Hybrids usually comprise an incubator provided with a removable hood and with a heat radiation source and combine as a result advantages of two types of devices in themselves: The comfortable climate necessary for a patient can be reliably guaranteed with a closed incubator. A heat radiation source above a care unit makes possible the open operation of that unit, which substantially facilitates access to the patient for care and treatment purposes. The function of hybrids can be easily changed over from one type of device to another, i.e., from a closed incubator to an open care unit or vice versa, with little effort.
Closed incubators usually generate the necessary climate by convective heating and an air humidifier; open care units are usually heated by means of heat radiation sources. An incubator of this type, which has a heat radiation source in a removable hood, is known from U.S. Pat. No. 6,231,499 B1. It follows from this that the heat radiation source is located at a very short distance from the patient when the hood is closed and can come into contact with the atmosphere in the interior of the incubator, which sometimes has an increased oxygen content.
To make it possible to rule out injury to the patient and inflammation in an atmosphere with high oxygen content, the heat radiation source must already have been cooled when the incubator is closed or it can be heated only when the hood of the incubator has already been opened and has a sufficient distance from the patient. Since the infrared radiation sources used in practice frequently have surface temperatures of a few hundred degrees Celsius during the operation, the transition time may have to amount to several minutes when the function of such hybrids is changed over from one type of device to another in order to ensure that the infrared radiation source will have cooled sufficiently during the transition from the open care unit to the closed incubator before it comes into the vicinity of the patient and vice versa, and conversely that the infrared radiation source will already have reached a sufficient distance from the patient before it is heated up during the transition from the closed incubator to the open care unit. The temperature in the incubator may decrease greatly for a certain period of time in both cases. This leads to cooling of the patient in the meantime, especially in case of premature newborns.